She Found the Key

Darlene was already in a foul mood the day her mother called—drunk.

Darlene’s last marriage had been one more fatal attraction that quickly went bad. The only reason she had hung on for as long as she did was that he had a lot of what she needed: money.

The relationship she was in now was messy. Darlene did everything she knew to do her part. She was charming, witty, and beautiful. Attentive to his every need. And the harder she tried to pull him in, the further away he pulled.

It wasn’t working. She didn’t even know why she called it a relationship. The only relationship they had was in her mind.

It had been a lot to bear when her youngest brother had committed suicide six years ago. It had been a lot for her and her mother. But now this fluke twist of fate. Who would have thought a person could get that injured falling off utility steps in a kitchen? Her sister had been visiting her mother, helping her clean her kitchen. One moment she was on the ladder cleaning cupboards; the next she was lying on the floor.

It was too much when her mother called—drunk—with the doctor’s most recent prognosis: her sister would be in a coma, paralyzed, for the rest of her life. The swelling from the concussion had permanently damaged part of her brain.

Darlene called a friend. Her friend listened, and then shared some advice.

“The hardest thing for me was understanding that letting go didn’t mean letting go of people, places, and things,” Darlene’s friend said. “It was letting go of my ideas about how life should go.”

“That day my mother called drunk was my bottoming out,” Darlene said. “All of it—the relationships, my mom’s alcoholism, my brother’s death, my sister’s injury—became too much. Any illusions I had about being able to control life disappeared.

“I finally just surrendered.

“I let go.”

Three years later, Darlene picked up the telephone and called her mom. It was the evening before Darlene’s wedding. Who would have thought she’d be marrying a guy like this? She had turned him down when he first asked her for a date. “He’s a nerd,” she’d told her friends.

What she had learned over the next year was that this nerd was a good guy. He treated her well. And she no longer felt like she had to manipulate and control men to be taken care of because she could take care of herself.

“It became easier to take care of myself than to try to manipulate everyone around me into taking care of me,” she said. “It also set me free. I didn’t have to be in a relationship for survival. I could be there for other reasons—friendship, play, and laughter. Love.

“I could be myself.”

Darlene’s mother answered the phone. She was tipsy, but not slurring drunk. Darlene talked with her about her sister. Darlene tried to visit her in the nursing home at least once a week. There wasn’t much she could do there. Darlene talked about how excited she was to be getting married. They were planning a small elopement ceremony, then a romantic honeymoon. Her mother said she was happy for her.

“I was just thinking about things,” Darlene said, “and realizing how hard this must be for you, with Sis so sick, and all. How hard it must have been raising us kids alone, with no help from Dad. Remember when Uncle Terry came to live with us?”

Her mom said yes, she remembered.

“Well, remember how when I told you that he was touching me in bad ways, you didn’t think twice about it? You believed me, and you just booted him right out?”

Her mom said yes, she remembered that, too.
“I’m just calling to thank you for that,” Darlene said. “It meant a lot to me that you protected me and you cared.”

Sometimes the unknown that we’re called to enter is the entire journey of our lives. We start out with an idea about how life should go, and then we realize it’s not going that way, but we keep hanging on to it because we don’t know what else to do or think. Slowly, life wears away our resistance. And we still hold on because we can’t imagine what to think or how to conceptualize what this journey is about. We can’t imagine where it might go if it’s not going where we imagined it would.

Stop thinking you know how life should go. Most likely, you don’t.

It’s not always a person or a thing we’re letting go of. Sometimes letting go of our ideas about how things should be, how they should feel, and what’s coming next is what we need to do to go into the unknown.

Going into the unknown isn’t just something we do when things go wrong. The happiest people I know are people who wake up each day with an attitude of wonder and awe—or at least a willingness to stumble reluctantly into the unknown.

“I give myself a migraine every time I try to control life,” a friend of mine said one day.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve been known to make myself physically ill by trying to control things I can’t.”

Shed the illusions one by one. Complain. Gripe. Cry. Feel. Grieve.

There’s nothing wrong with having hopes, plans, and dreams. But most of life doesn’t work out exactly as we thought and hoped it would. Events have their own way of transpiring, unfolding, and taking place. Even the things that are good in life usually work out differently from what we thought.

Darlene found the key to her power when she surrendered to a big pile of pain. Not all people have as tough of a road as Darlene. Some have a lighter path; some have it worse.

Surrendering control doesn’t mean relinquishing our power. It does the opposite. It gives us the power to quietly choose how we want to act.

Letting go of our ideas about how life should go is a choice that sets life’s magic free.

From the book: Choices: Taking Control of Your Life and Making It Matter